Homeland Security officials who defied Congress and misled the public by creating secret files on American citizens while testing a new passenger screening program may have engaged in multiple counts of criminal conduct, and at least one employee has already lied to cover-up the misdeed.

This week brought yet another privacy scandal for the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) fundamentally flawed "Secure Flight" passenger surveillance program. The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) chief privacy officer, Nuala O' Connor-Kelly, is launching an investigation to find out whether the program broke federal privacy law by hiding from the public the extent to which it has been digging through commercial databases for the private information of innocent Americans.

Secure Flight plans to force airlines and reservations services to hand over your personal travel information in order to match it against the names on secret government "watch lists" to decide whether you're allowed to fly.

Two government reports confirm what EFF and other privacy advocacy organizations have long known: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lied about its role in using airline passengers as guinea pigs for testing "Secure Flight" - the latest version of a fundamentally flawed passenger-profiling system for screening terrorists. And not only did TSA lie, it lied repeatedly, to everyone.

On Friday President Bush signed into law the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA; PDF), launching several flawed "security" schemes that EFF has long opposed. The media has focused on turf wars between the intelligence and defense communities, but the real story is how IRTPA trades basic rights for the illusion of security. For instance:

~ Section 1016 - a.k.a. "TIA II" ~

A clause authorizing the creation of a massive "Information Sharing Environment" (ISE) to link "all appropriate Federal, State, local, and tribal entities, and the private sector."

Bruce Schneier has a new op-ed questioning the rationale behind checking all air travelers against the government's "no-fly" list, the central feature of the new CAPPS II, "Secure Flight":

Imagine a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can't ever let them fly, yet so innocent that we can't arrest them -- even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act.

This is the federal government's "no-fly" list. First circulated in the weeks after 9/11 as a counterterrorism tool, its details are shrouded in secrecy.

But, because the list is filled with inaccuracies and ambiguities, thousands of innocent, law-abiding Americans have been subjected to lengthy interrogations and invasive searches every time they fly, and sometimes forbidden to board airplanes.